Empowering Women to Lead

Anna Goldberg, Diversity and Inclusion Strategist

Arthur Woods, Co-Founder of Imperative

5 Ways to Empower Women in the Workforce to Succeed Using Purpose

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"Purpose is the ingredient that finally unlocks the potential of inclusion for all

employees."

– Jennifer Brown (Author, Inclusion)

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Empowering Women to Lead

Introduction…………………………………..……………………………..4

Our Research…………………………………..…………………………..10

The Facts………………………………….. ………………………………12

Profile on Cindy Pace, MetLife……………………………………………16

The 5 Ways to Empower Women……………………………..……..…….17

Additional Profiles of Successful Purpose-Driven Female Leaders.…….33

5 Ways to Empower Women in the Workforce to Succeed Using Purpose

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The purpose movement is redefining how to measure success within an organization and disrupting how organizations manage talent.

By creating an organizational environment where purpose is valued and rewarded and psychological safety is a requirement, it creates an environment where women will thrive.

Purpose enables everyone to identify and act on their fullest potential and work towards a more fulfilled – and productive – workplace of the future.

The journey towards creating workplaces where women thrive does not happen overnight, but this eBook outlines steps that you can take within your organization to continue on this important journey!

“Purpose is thereason wework beyondfinancialrewards andrecognition.”

-Aaron Hurst, CEO, Imperative

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Introduction

Women are much more likely to embrace purpose and become leaders fueled by building relationships, having an impact, and continuously growing, ultimately making an organization more productive and inclusive.

PURPOSE IS….

• Letting go of fear

• Being authentic

• Focusing on true value

• Creating a new identity that doesn’t put you in a box

Introduction

THE WORKPLACE NEEDS TO ADAPT TO ENABLE WOMEN TO LEAD.

PURPOSE ISTHE KEY.

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By empowering ONE WOMAN, you have the power to CHANGE AN ENTIRE INDUSTRY.

Hire a Woman

She is empowered to embrace purpose and lead

Purpose is measured and valued as a part of performance management

Those women become leaders of new teams

Organizational culture begins to shift to focus on psychological safety as a baseline requirement where all people can be their authentic selves

Organization is so successful that competitors emulate talent models and purpose becomes a part of the entire industry

She builds teams filled with purpose-oriented workers and more women are hired

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Introduction

Purpose is the intersection of how your personal intrinsic motivations effect your relationships, the impact you strive to make, and your growth opportunities.

To begin, leaders and managers have the opportunity to model purpose-oriented careers and work with employees to build self awareness about what drives purpose in their current work. They should help their employees realize they don't have to be in a job like “social worker” to find work meaningful and that purpose comes from within and from the way people experience work. Having purpose in our careers requires acknowledging and then investing in the growth of these moments instead of taking them for granted.

Before enhancing a workplace for women to thrive, employees and employers need to actively look for ways to boost personal relationships, drive greater impact, and find personal growth opportunities. Employees need to continuously assess their individual level of purpose at work and hack their approach to their work to optimize for meaning and fulfillment.

Women are 43% more likely to be purpose –oriented workers.(Imperative Workforce Purpose Index 2015)

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Introduction

Once employers and employees have begun thinking about relationships, impact, and growth individually, it is critical to think about ways to boost all three areas for maximum levels of fulfilment!

Each intersection point creates a key aspect to creating an inclusive workplace.

• Intersection of Impact and Relationships – this is the opportunity to create a sense of belonging. When you are building strong relationships and feel like you are making an impact, you will feel a strong sense of connection to your team or work.

• Intersection of Relationships and Growth – this is where mentoring and constructive feedback come in. Strong relationships enable others to help you grow as an individual both professionally and personally.

• Intersection of Impact and Growth – This is where innovation happens! When you are willing to challenge yourself and striving to make an impact you are able to experiment, fail fast, and challenge yourself.

WOMEN ARE…

11% more likely to have meaningful relationships at work.

10% more likely to feel like their work makes an impact.

5% more likely to feel like they are growing personally at work.(Imperative Workforce Purpose Index 2015)

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Introduction

Once there is an awareness of purpose among employees and teams, a fundamental shift in mindset can take place, where purpose, and not money and status, becomes the dominant orientation to a job.

The result is that purpose-oriented employees emerge as leaders. Because women are statistically more likely to be purpose-oriented, this results in the elevation of the role of women in the workplace. Women will gain confidence and begin to transform organizations and markets with visions that change our perspective on what’s possible.

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Introduction

Our Research

Imperative has studied purpose-driven people extensively over the last three years.

• Identified and studied 300 purpose pioneers in the US, Europe, and Asia

• Conducted a US and global survey of the emergence and characteristics of purpose in the workforce

• Collaborated on the implementation of purpose development programs for leading employers from LinkedIn and MetLife to Sony Music

• Surveyed students at three leading universities to understand their orientation to purpose and expectations for their careers

• Developed in depth profiles of dozens of Purposeful CEOs for Fast Company

As a part of the initiative to better understand the connection between women succeeding in the workplace and purpose, additional secondary research was completed.

THE STUDY OF PURPOSE

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Our Research

The scope of this work is focused on exploring opportunities, challenges, and strategies for women in the United States who are typically knowledge workers in mid-size to large organizations.

While at this time this research and data is solely focused on women in the U.S., the goal of this work is to enable individuals and organizations to create inclusive environments and systems for everyone, and many of these strategies may be applied broadly.

SCOPE

Purpose-driven companies have outperformed the S&P 500 by 14x and Good to Great Companies by 6x over a period of 15 years.

Purpose-driven organizations are 202%more likely to report revenue growth.

87% of executives believe they perform best when purpose goes beyond profit.

PURPOSE FACTS“People become

motivated when you guide them to the source of their own power and when you make heroes out of employees who personify what you want to see in the organization.”

-Anita Roddick

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The Facts

(The Business Case for Purpose, Ernst and Young, Harvard Business Review, 2015)

…meaning purpose-oriented women are proven to be successful leaders.

YET…

Women today account for only 5.8% of the CEOs of S&P 500 companies and 20.2% of the board members of Fortune 1000 companies.

Women are more than 20% less likely than men to say their manager often gives them difficult feedback that improves their performance.

Women are excluded from many networks that open doors to further development and opportunities.

EMPLOYEES ARE SEARCHING FOR COMPANIES TO TAKE A STAND…

A Povaddo study found that 84% of respondents would like to see their employer use its influence to take a public stand and / or be more vocal on equal opportunity in the workplace.

THE WORKPLACE NEEDS TO ADAPT TO ENABLE WOMEN TO LEAD. PURPOSE IS THE KEY.

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WOMEN ARE 43% MORE LIKELY TO BE PURPOSE-ORIENTED…The Facts

Women are driven to succeed. However, the kind of work they are doing matters. Women find work meaningful when it allows them to be able to empower others and be empowered — when they feel they have agency and impact in their work or career.

Research has shown that women must be intrinsically motivated to aspire to leadership roles before taking action and seizing opportunities. While leadership aspirations can provide focus, it is recommended that women anchor themselves in a meaningful purpose — fulfilling work aligned with their talents and core values as well as the organization’s purpose. By focusing on work that provides fulfillment, impact, and personal significance, women may strengthen the belief in their ability to perform across a variety of situations.

How Remarkable Women Lead by Barsh, Cranston, and Lewis reveals what makes successful women thrive in their leadership. They found that meaning, or finding strengths and putting them to work in the service of an inspiring purpose; connecting, or identifying who can help one grow, building stronger relationships, and increasing one’s sense of belonging; and engaging, or finding one’s voice, becoming self-reliant and confident by accepting opportunities and the inherent risks they bring, and collaborating with others. Women are relational, in that building relationships and collaborating with others is part of how they learn and communicate. These key aspects are also core to purpose.

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Case for Empowering Women to Lead with Purpose

(Pace, CR. (2017). Women in Management and Leadership Dissertation Literature Review. ProQuest Dissertation Publishing.)

“Purpose is the imperative for empowering women to lead. It can provide direction and motivation to stay the course in the face of

obstacles and career setbacks."– Cindy Pace, Ed.D., CPL

(Assistant Vice President, D&I, at MetLife)-

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Profile on Empowering Women to Lead with Purpose

DR. CINDY PACECertified Purpose LeaderMetlife

As a Connector, Cindy experiences purpose by building a community of empowered female leaders who will lead the positive change we need to see.

As part of her role in leading MetLife’s Global Women’s Initiative, Cindy was tasked with designing a women’s leadership program that would strengthen the readiness and capability of emerging female leaders to take on broader and more complex leadership roles. The result was the launch of a 14 month experience. Through the implementation of the program, her doctoral research, and existing theories on developing women leaders, Cindy was well aware that the path to senior and executive leadership can be an arduous journey beset by challenges and trade-offs. She saw an opportunity to elevate the program by developing a course that enables women to flourish and thrive. Her research findings and review of the literature uncovered that purpose —fulfilling work aligned with one’s talents and core values as well as the organization’s purpose — can provide women with the direction and motivation to stay the course in the face of obstacles and career setbacks. It was clear that purpose had to be part of the program’s core.

In 2015, she added a course to empower women entitled “Leading and Working with Purpose” and partnered with Imperative to leverage their tools and research. To date, 150+ women globally have participated in the course. As a result, women are now armed with an understanding of what drives purpose in their work, how to build stronger relationships, and experience positive impact and growth. 16

To develop a workplace that enables women to lead, we recommend implementing these five strategies. In this eBook we share ways to empower the women in your organization, specific actions to take, as well as resources and tools to use that we have found create breakthrough results. These recommendations go hand in hand with Imperative’s Developing Purpose-Driven Leaders eBook and should be used in parallel.

THE 5 WAYS:

1. Advocate using relationships, impact, and growth

2. Build relationships based on purpose

3. Develop psychological safety on teams, allowing people to be their authentic selves

4. Build confidence through purpose storytelling

5. Value women through hiring

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The 5 Ways to Empower Women

Purpose creates a culture where we can all be successful!

Purpose creates language to help men and women increase trust and collaboration. It creates bridges by changing the narrative of how success is defined.

To grow fulfillment and purpose, you need to focus on relationships, impact, and growth (RIG). By using metrics of RIG to provide feedback, conversations about growth become normalized as a necessity and part of a culture.

Purpose allows women to advocate for their careers through the framework of RIG removing the hesitance women may have to advocate for themselves.

ADVOCATE USING RELATIONSHIPS, IMPACT, AND GROWTH

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The 5 Ways to Empower Women1

Recommended actions:

When it is time to set goals for the year, or month with team members, set goals specifically around each RIG area (relationships, impact, growth) so expectations are clear about growth, and it becomes a part of the overall performance plan

Begin doing regular check-ins with your team members to provide feedback and frame the conversation each week on how that individual is doing in terms of their relationships, impact, and growth

Encourage your team members to advocate for their work using the framework of relationships, impact, and growth

Measure RIG across the workforce as an indicator of success and to identify potential problem areas

ADVOCATE USING RELATIONSHIPS, IMPACT, AND GROWTH

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The 5 Ways to Empower Women1

Imperative has a RIG app that lets employees do regular mindfulness check-ins on their relationships, impact, and growth and provides job hacks to achieve higher levels of fulfillment at work.

ADVOCATE USING RELATIONSHIPS, IMPACT, AND GROWTH

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The 5 Ways to Empower Women1

The 5 Ways to Empower WomenBUILD RELATIONSHIPS BASED ON PURPOSE

Purpose gives a team a shared sense of belonging to something greater than themselves.

Discovering an individual’s purpose and what intrinsically motivates them unlocks new ways to connect with others. Purpose uncovers similarities to shape strong bonds for people who on the outside may appear to have nothing in common, but share personal purpose.

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The 5 Ways to Empower WomenBUILD RELATIONSHIPS BASED ON PURPOSE

Recommended actions:

Identify individuals in your organization who share the same intrinsic motivations

Reach out to one, or more, of these individuals to schedule an informational interview to learn more about their job, or based on your company culture, schedule time to grab a meal with this individual

Use your shared motivators as the conversation starting point to better understand how that individual uses those motivators in their work and how it’s helped them grow within their career

If your organization has formal mentorship or counselor programs, request a mentor or counselor who shares your purpose

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The 5 Ways to Empower Women

The Imperative platform allows you to look up any member in your organization and their purpose drivers.

This tool enables you to identify leaders or people in other functions who you may have more in common with than what’s visible on the outside.

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BUILD RELATIONSHIPS BASED ON PURPOSE2

The 5 Ways to Empower WomenDEVELOP PSYCHOLOGICAL SAFETY

Purpose-driven leaders create environments that build

trust and psychological safety through authentic

conversations.

By leaders sharing their own biases and discussing the

biases of the team, it opens a more comfortable

pathway for team members to be vulnerable and share

their personal experiences, so team members can learn

about one another and feel comfortable speaking up.

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The 5 Ways to Empower WomenDEVELOP PSYCHOLOGICAL SAFETY

Recommended actions:

If you are a leader of a team, share your own purpose-story at your next team meeting to demonstrate a safe space on the team

Try to be vulnerable and share something you may not have shared in the past

Discuss the team biases and brainstorm how the team can put in the effort to overcome these biases

If there is a baseline culture of psychological safety, encourage team members to share their own personal purpose stories and be vulnerable with one another

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The 5 Ways to Empower WomenDEVELOP PSYCHOLOGICAL SAFETY

The Imperative Individual and Team Purpose Profile provide you with detailed information on your and your team’s drivers and biases. In addition, Imperative’s Purpose-Story Telling tool guides you through the process of crafting your own personal purpose story. These are a great starting point to learn about one another and normalize the value that diversity brings to a team.

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The 5 Ways to Empower WomenBUILD CONFIDENCE THROUGH PURPOSE STORYTELLING

When relationships, impact, and growth are the metrics for success, you are able to feel more confident about your strengths and contributions to the organization.

Purpose defines the value in every single person. By using purpose for your bio and story, you are able to clearly advocate your value in a way that is meaningful to the organization, and gives you the language to be confident in your own personal super powers!

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The 5 Ways to Empower Women

Recommended actions:

Use your purpose to re-write your bio story to use when giving your personal ’30-second pitch’

Use purpose to talk about the work you’ve done and how it has made an impact

If you are a manager, use purpose as a metric to motivate and reward your team. Celebrate those on your team who are both productive and activating their personal purpose!

Use this language when interviewing or looking for new positions to apply for roles where you will thrive

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4 BUILD CONFIDENCE THROUGH PURPOSE STORYTELLING

The 5 Ways to Empower Women

The Imperative Personal Purpose Profile provides 25+ pages of insights, language, and information to help you better understand your own motivators as well as language to communicate your purpose to others.

Report includes…• Personalized purpose drivers

and purpose statement• Deep dive on your purpose type• Deep dive on your purpose

leadership style• ‘Watch Out’s of potential biases• Purpose Power-Ups• How to apply your purpose• Insights into how to focus your

volunteering and philanthropy• Personalized Purpose Super

Hero Poster29

4 BUILD CONFIDENCE THROUGH PURPOSE STORYTELLING

The 5 Ways to Empower WomenVALUE WOMEN THROUGH HIRING

Purpose defines the potential in all of us!

Women are 43% more likely to be purpose-oriented. By focusing on hiring intrinsically motivated talent, your workforce will become both more diverse and more purpose-oriented.

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The 5 Ways to Empower WomenVALUE WOMEN THROUGH HIRING

Recommended actions:When hiring for a new role, draft the job description

using purpose-oriented language. Outline job in terms of relationships, impact, and growth, not only in terms of the requirements and responsibilities of the role

Remove information from application that could lead to unconscious biases in selection (e.g. Name, School, Age) when reviewing applications

When selecting candidates, use purpose-orientation as a lens to advance candidates to the next round

Ensure multiple people with different intrinsic motivators review and provide input on candidate before making hiring decision

Use purpose to onboard candidates effectively so they quickly gain psychological safety and a sense of belonging within the organization.

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The 5 Ways to Empower WomenVALUE WOMEN THROUGH HIRING

Imperative’s Hiring Coach tool identifies intrinsically motivated candidates and provides customized interview questions based on the candidate’s intrinsic motivators to appeal to their individual purpose type. The tool also provides statistics of where this candidate compares to other candidates applying and others in the organization and the candidate’s personal purpose type to ensure the candidate lands in a role where they will thrive.

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ADDITIONAL PROFILES OF PURPOSE DRIVEN FEMALE LEADERS

Nancy GreenCEO

Erin GanjuCEO

Dara Richardson-HeronFormer CEO

Tara RussellPRESIDENT

AS SEEN ON

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Nancy GreenCEO

Harmony-Driven Leader

Read more about Nancy Green

Green has made it her mission “to make sure I helped everybody I could to be successful at work and in being a mother.” As a manager, she encouraged women to have families but also come back to work and not give up their careers. “I made sure that we got our work done and we were all able to walk out the door when we needed to walk out the door.”

Green admits that working in a nearly all-female organization has perhaps made it easier to embrace this leadership approach, “It gives everyone an appreciation for the complexity of demands and fulfillment. Things can be complex when you blend family, business, and life.”

Green says her approach to leadership is to constantly balance strength and power with softness: “I can be very demanding and I have extremely high standards, but I understand that people are human. I think it’s a combination of accepting that women can be strong and powerful and soft at the same time.”

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Dara Richardson-Heron

Former CEO

Society-Driven Leader

The YWCA likes to say it’s in the business of achieving “equity for all.” “I would love to put our organization out of business. Nothing would make me happier,” says its former CEO Dara Richardson-Heron.

Richardson-Heron is a doctor by training. As a child, she recalls being struck by watching her grandparent’s doctor. He was a good doctor and helped her grandparents, but she “wanted to do something that would impact large groups as opposed to just the individuals” she could see by herself.

She challenged her colleagues to put issues in the context of the broader world and the needs of women and girls. She helped them practice what she learned in medical school–finding the root cause and solving what really matters. You have to “take it one day at a time, don’t get discouraged, and keep moving forward until you achieve the intended outcome. Only incremental change leads to larger sustainable change.”

Read more about Dara Richardson-Heron 35

Tara RussellPresident

Read more about Tara Russell

Tara Russell hit the jackpot in 2013. The CEO of Carnival Cruises asked her to lead a new brand, Fathom, for the largest cruise line in the world. He wanted her to build the first “social impact” cruise experience where travelers could go ashore and volunteer in local communities to work on projects like planting trees, making chocolate, and creating life-saving water filters.

As the head of Fathom, Russell not only challenges and celebrates her travelers, she applies the same human-centered approach to her management. She has built the culture around authentic human connection and understanding the strengths and challenges of everyone working to support the Fathom experience.

Fathom is a vision for unleashing 11 million superheroes on the world to be conscious parents, leaders, employees, and citizens. It helps them discover and love what is special within them and see opportunities for impact in every direction. She has done something few leaders have done successfully. She has fallen in love with her customers instead of her product.

Human-Driven Leader

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Erin GanjuCEO

As CEO, Ganju attributes her success to building communities, investing in relationships, hiring and empowering local leaders to own the design and implementation of the solutions for their countries. “We’ve really held to having our country directors be local nationals, and 88% of our staff worldwide are all local nationals.”

Ganju’s alternative approach offers a distinct advantage. “A library shouldn’t look the same in Tanzania and Sri Lanka. You want it to be very contextualized, and there are certain key components, but a lot of it comes with the ingenuity and the creativity and the innovation of our staff.”

Though the cost is significant for a nonprofit, Ganjusays the ROI has been tremendous. Teams in individual countries are deeply passionate about their work, but when they connect with peers doing the same work in another country all of their passion gets amplified.

Community-Driven Leader

Read more about Erin Ganju 37

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Imperative is the global leader in the science of purpose at work. We partner with forward-thinking employers to equip them with the tools, resources and training to build purpose-driven leaders. To learn more about Imperative and our solutions for employers, contact:

Arthur Woods, Co-Founderarthur@imperative.comimperative.com

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ABOUT THE AUTHORS

ANNA GOLDBERG ARTHUR WOODSAnna builds meaningful relationships to cultivate climates and systems where everyone flourishes. She is a Diversity and Inclusion Strategist with 4+ years of talent strategy experience at Deloitte Consulting. She served as Imperative’s 2017 Summer Fellow as a part of her MBA experience. She currently leads the Women’s Business Connection, a 350+ organization supporting Women and Manbassadors (male allies) within the UCLA Anderson business school program.

Arthur’s imperative is to help people achieve their greatest potential by driving innovation and building community in the workplace. He is a serial entrepreneur, writer, and advisor to leading brands on unlocking people’s potential in the workplace. He is the co-founder of Imperative. Arthur co-founded Out in Tech, the world’s largest LGBTQ community in technology. Arthur previous worked at Google where he led YouTube’s education division and played a leading role in Google’s LGBTQ employee resource group.

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SOURCES• Barsh, J., Cranston, S., & Lewis, G. (2009). How remarkable women lead: The breakthrough model for work and life. New York,

NY: Crown Business

• Ely, R. J., Ibarra, H., & Kolb, D. M. (2011). Taking gender into account: Theory and design for women’s leadership development programs. Academy of Management Learning and Education, 10(3), 474-493

• Everyday Moments of Truth: Frontline Managers Are Key to Women's Career Aspirations http://www.bain.com/publications/articles/everyday-moments-of-truth.aspx

• Great Leaders Who Make the Mix Work, Boris Connolly-Boris Abrahams - https://hbr.org/2013/09/great-leaders-who-make-the-mix-work

• Harvard Business Review, and Ernst and Young. The Business Case for Purpose. Ernst and Young, 2015, www.ey.com/Publication/vwLUAssets/ey-the-business-case-for-purpose/$FILE/ey-the-business-case-for-purpose.pdf

• Imperative, and NYU. 2015 Workforce Purpose Index , https://cdn.imperative.com/media/public/Purpose_Index_2015

• Imperative, and LinkedIn. 2016 Global Purpose Index, https://cdn.imperative.com/media/public/Global_Purpose_Index_2016.pdf

• Lean In, and McKinsey & Company. Women in the Workplace 2016.

• New Diversity Chiefs Share Their Biggest Challenges, Lydia Dishman - https://www.fastcompany.com/3057715/new-diversity-chiefs-share-their-biggest-challenges

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• Pace, C, Dissertation on Women in Leadership

• Statistical Overview of Women in the Workforce, Acostigan - http://www.catalyst.org/knowledge/statistical-overview-women-workforce

• Women Want Five Things, Center for Talent Innovation http://www.talentinnovation.org/publication.cfm?publication=1451

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